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Yahoo! Should Buy Waze

2013-06-04T13:20:57Z

If you haven’t checked out the TMCnet feature by Josh Alexander about companies Yahoo! should purchase, please do… I’ll wait. Ok – now that you’re back – isn’t this guy funny? It isn’t too often I read an article about tech where I learn things and also laugh out loud.

Thankfully the piece reminded me to write something I have been thinking for a while. Yahoo! should buy Waze. Yes, the mobile, social company is rumored to be in discussions on-and-off with Google and Facebook but Yahoo makes more sense to me as the best suitor because the world’s first web directory needs to be strong in mobile and social.

If you haven’t tried Waze, please take a moment to download it... Again, I’ll wait. This app is easy to use and is infectious in nature. It’s successfully warned me of a number of road hazards ahead of time and saved me from tons of traffic. Moreover, it is smart… It knows where I am going and routes me there without me asking. It’s an app with intelligence. Other developers can learn from their examples.

It is easy to see how this app can be extended to provide relevant information when you are walking around city streets or in a mall. For example, I can envision a popup from another Wazer telling me about the shoes they just bought on sale or the special two-for-one offer at the corner coffee shop.

The point is, Waze is an amazing app and gives Yahoo exactly what they need. If Google were to purchase the company, it would further cement their position in mobile and location based services. Facebook would gain from a Waze buy as it would have a strong GPS play but the social networks are obviously redundant. Then again, Instagram is redundant as well and that turned out to be a good decision by Zuckerberg.

Video is the Recurring Star

2013-01-30T00:11:15Z

There is an insatiable demand for content of the video variety. It is so great in fact that sports networks like ESPN are getting an outsized portion of your cable bill. The network in fact gets more than $5 per subscriber per month regardless of whether you ever watch their networks. Cable and IPTV companies for their part are in quite a pickle as more subscribers drop their service altogether for OTT competition. The solution to the problem is painful for many but will eventually be taking sports programming and breaking it out into tiers according to Gary Kim who writes on TMCnet. He explains the first step these companies are taking is adding a $3 fee for local sports programming. At some point ESPN will have to be dealt with it seems.

We have all heard content is king and - remember that until recently Netflix took a massive hit to its earnings due to its lack of leverage in negotiating with content providers. The solution? Develop more of your own content. Exactly what the company is going to do with some of the $400 million in debt it just raised.

TMC’s Erik Linask had this to say about the news: “Companies like Netflix and Hulu are proving that the longstanding dominance of mainstream networks may be in jeopardy. The combination of a modern business model, high-quality programming, and multi-device capabilities, present a compelling case for today's connected viewer, potentially disrupting the competitive landscape to the benefit of the consumer.”

To summarize: content is still king but consumers will soon have the ability to pick from infinite monarchs.

And as more of this content is streamed to various devices, networks have become more clogged than ever. The good news is the emerging H.265 standard which was just approved by ITU is twice as efficient as the current H.264 standard deployed on most tablets and smartphones and data centers pumping the content out.

Amazon today deployed news which is wonderful for the video market with the launch of Amazon Web Services Launches Amazon Elastic Transcoder a solution which leverages the company’s cloud to obsolete the entire market of small transcoding companies playing in the video space. Of course your definition of “wonderful” will vary based on where you sit in the food chain.

Can we make a prediction about the future of video? It seems we are taking baby steps to a la carte programming or at least packages which give consumers some additional choices when it comes to sports and other areas. Investors believe there is money to be made in content production which means the Netflix deal may spawn others. Content will still be king but it gets tougher to stand out when there seems to be endless consumer choice in programming. We have seen Yahoo try the video production game on and off without a great deal of success – perhaps they just did a poor job of it or maybe times have changed. One thing in favor of all these video production entrants is the new connected TVs and cheap consumer electronic devices allowing TV sets to easily display video from the Internet.

In 1979 the Buggles launched the hit song Video Killed the Radio Star which at the time seemed to make sense with the advent of MTV which chose this song as its very first video to play. But over the years it seems radio too has evolved being transmitted from space and traveling over the Internet for example. So radio actually never died. Let me clear up the confusion from my younger readers - MTV was a network which at one time actually played music television. But I digress – I wonder if the title of the song should have been “Video is the Recurring Star.”

Yahoo Kills off Livestand

2012-05-26T01:38:15Z

It took six months but Yahoo decided its Livestand newsreader will no longer be offered. Apparently the competition from Google Currents, Zite and Flipboard was too much.

I mentioned this past December that the Livestand user interface was clunky and I suppose this is what did the product in. That of course and being late to the party and seeing superior competition from Google - whose interface is better.

Think about it though - Yahoo has virtually infinite marketing real estate avaialble to it and could have made this product a success. Perhaps they decided its new Axis browser is more strategic and a better place to focus on.

Interestingly I just checked out the Yahoo blog post on the matter and they confirmed my suspicions. Here is an excerpt:

While we received great feedback on Livestand's design and it earned a 4-star rating in the App Store, we committed ourselves to continuously measure and scrutinize what’s working and what isn’t. We have learned a lot from Livestand and are actively applying those insights toward the development of future products that are better aligned with Yahoo!'s holistic mobile strategy.

We are pivoting to a mobile-products-first development model (check out Yahoo! Axis as a great example of this) and there’s no doubt that one of the biggest, if not THE biggest, priorities for us is to innovate for the mobile user, whether they’re using feature phones, smartphones or tablets – or iOS apps, Android apps or mobile web browsers, for that matter.

We know we're headed towards a time when people in all markets will actually use the web more on connected devices like phones, tablets, TVs, and consoles than they do on PCs. We already have millions of people using Yahoo! on mobile phones and tablets each month, and are seeing that number grow rapidly.

I have mixed emotions about Yahoo's decision here. On the one hand Axis has tremendous potential and on the other, being the central app which people use to manage their news is important to a company looking to become more relevant in the world of mobile. But if resources are limited they made the right choice - but then again you imagine there are other places to cut besides from one of your newest apps.

Yahoo Reinvents Mobile Browser with Axis

2012-05-24T01:26:27Z

Yahoo has taken the mobile browser and improved it dramatically by integrating search and allowing users to view results rapidly without the need to open page after page. While Google allows similar functionality on a desktop what Yahoo has done here is put the results of browsing up top where they should be. And with the simple swipe of a finger a user can scroll through pages after page to see the site they are looking for.

If you take the best parts of Google Instant and the now defunct visual SearchMe bowser and put them together with some added features you get Yahoo’s Axis.

Available on iOS in an iPad and iPhone version as well as a Firefox extension, expect the browser to have broad cross-platform support. One definite plus is the browser makes it much easier to research. When you are ready to search in fact the top 40% of the iPad screen (the device I tested on) is devoted to suggested search terms, latest news and pictures of results pages.

The company has radically rethought the search/browser relationship.

One downside is the Firefox extension on a PC semi-lockup up my browser on install. After I killed the Firefox process tree all was well again. A simple reboot would have also done the trick. Once installed I noticed that all the coolness of the browser such as screen shots of results pages appeared along the bottom – with a search box.

The only downside is this effectively means that in certain instances you won't be able to access clickable areas at the bottom of the screen. I had to use F11 to get a full-screen browser in fact to allow the blogging software I use based on Moveable Type to work properly when adding pictures.

Is Yahoo now relevant again? I can’t answer the question but I am very impressed with this accomplishment and if it gains traction it could position the company very well as a mobile play – not to mention having even more influence in the browser market – beyond just a toolbar play. IBM had a near death experience and came back stronger than ever – ditto for Apple. If Yahoo does return to its former glory – and it is way way too early to even consider this a possibility, it will be a product like Axis which will be responsible.

It is worth pointing out that others think this browser is great as well. Check out what Jolie O’Dell has to say over at VentureBeat.

And now that Chrome has overtaken IE as the dominant browser, it is as good a time as any to add some serious competition into the mix.

See Yahoo Axis Search in Action

Yahoo Axis Swipe to See Other Results

Yahoo Axis Cool Start Screen

Yahoo Axis Lets You Share on Pinterest

Yahoo Axis Local Mode Protects Privacy to Some Degree

How Megaupload Takedown Hurts Cloud Computing

2012-01-22T19:07:24Z

How self-destructive US policies are hurting hiring and industry
One of the biggest concerns regarding the passage of SOPA is that entire domain names could be blocked by federal authorities due to a single offending blog or web page. In this past week, major websites such as Wikipedia and Google engaged in an education campaign in order to have consumers put pressure on politicians who eventually reversed course on their support of the bill.

On a side note – as a conservative – the fact that a Republican, Representative Lamar Smith was the biggest proponent of this bill is horrifying. He should be thrown out of office by his constituents at the first possible chance.

Moreover, any politician who ever supported the bill should suffer the same fate.

But what is even scarier than theoretical web takedowns is actual ones and this week we saw Megaupload removed from the web because it allegedly engaged in activities which promoted pirating copyrighted material. Now if you aren’t a user of the site – and I never have been to my knowledge, you may be led to believe the US government was in its rights to take down a site designed solely to break the law.

But the challenge here is there are many users who used Megaupload for legitimate uses like sharing and storing files. These people are effectively cut off from their assets – and were given no notice this would happen.

Here are tweets from some angry users:

@taenina: #Megaupload was closed by the FBI… Was I the only one who had it for work files? Just get me my files back!!!

@Pattysplayhouse: They shut down #Megaupload. I had backup files of all my personal images up there on that site

@Roatandude: So I had a whole bunch of personal stuff stored in #Megaupload and now its gone. WTF!!! #StopSOPA

@Nicole8angel: Megaupload is one thing that helps me send big files to my group mates when we’re making projects… Bring it back...

Think about this – Megaupload was being used as cloud storage and was shut down because the site engaged in practices the US government deemed to be illegal. Isn’t this the exact same argument outlined above as it relates to SOPA? Yes.

So what we have determined is the government doesn’t need SOPA to shut down websites it deems to be acting in a way which does not respect copyright holders.

But this is where it gets interesting. The insatiable move to the cloud has led to consumers and businesses storing more and more of their files on services from a variety of companies. Amazon’s S3 for example stores terabytes of information and it is a safe bet some of the data in its cloud is not legal – meaning pirated. So should Amazon S3 be shut down? And how about Amazon.com? After all it’s the same company. Likewise for other companies who allow illegal data to be shared. Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, Dropbox, YouSendIt, you name it.

Obviously the issue is the degree of infringing data and moreover, what is the purpose of the service? For example, Napster was set up for no other reason but to share illegal music. Pretty clear cut and dry. But Megaupload has many legitimate users as well – so how does a determination get made in terms of the guilt, innocence and due process of such sites and services?

Well a good solution would be courts – but an argument can be made by the MPA that they take too long.

So we are left with what is really a grey area – it is unclear which sites will be future targets in-part because targets are determined by what users determine they want to share. So if millions of users tomorrow decide they want to use a specific cloud vendor for the purpose of setting up a new age Napster to share music and movies, the site could be targeted and taken down – along with the legitimate files stored on the service.

Explained another way, we are in legal cloud limbo. And it is worth stating firmly that the federal government is casting a shadow over cloud-computing – one of the hottest sectors of tech, receiving perhaps the most funding and doing the most hiring. I cannot think of anything more self-destructive for a society looking for economic growth to be doing.

11 Things Yahoo Must Do Now That Yang Has Stepped Down

2012-01-18T15:14:56Z

As reported on TMCnet yesterday, Jerry Yang, co-founder of Yahoo has stepped down from the board to pursue other interests. We have a great deal to thank Yang for – as the first company to categorize the web and build out many free services, society has benefit greatly from what Yahoo has more or less given away for free. That is the positive – the negative is the company has eroded top management and investor confidence for many years. Not to mention the botched Microsoft acquisition some years back at a valuation more than double what the company is worth now. To summarize the challenges at Yahoo, its a giant sloth competing against gazelles like Google and Facebook.

The massive amount of innovation and competitive instincts shown by Google’s founders as well as Mark Zuckerberg is a start contrast to Yang who never struck me as a competitive businessperson. Now that he is gone altogether and new CEO Scott Thompson is at the helm, here are some of the areas of focus the company should be dealing with in no particular order.

Marketing

Yahoo has tremendous depth – a dizzying array of services, apps and products – in many cases, the press and people outside Yahoo working on the projects aren’t aware of them. The first step in turning around a company is improving communications and making your services more sticky. Obviously this can only be accomplished if users know all there is to explore and benefit from.

Social

Yahoo has increased its ties with Facebook – in fact I would say it has done a great job in this regard – but the company needs to reach out to the Twitter community as well – and how about Instagram – this up and coming mobile, social photo-sharing network would be a strong asset in a world where there is value associated with owning the social network.

Mobile

Continuing on the social theme and merging it with mobile is Yahoo’s IntoNow app which allows an iPhone or iPad to become an interactive, social TV terminal. You can login with Facebook and the program will listen to your TV, decipher what channel and program you are watching and share the information with your friends. From there you can communicate with your friends about the program.

This is an awesome app which needs to be promoted more widely. Moreover, Yahoo has to do more leading-edge work like this. Then it may be up to the press to start covering it more.

Cloud

Google and Amazon are generating real revenue from the cloud and there is an opportunity for SMB and enterprise dollars if the company can find new and creative ways to leverage its data center. There are many small businesses for example that use Yahoo Mail… What about new hosted apps to extend mail into CRM, accounting and other areas? This can be done with partners if need be.

Music

According to Alexa, music.yahoo.com gets 1.42% of the site’s traffic which isn’t bad – but what about a mobile app for music like Pandora? Does it make sense to pick up this company, Spotify or Slacke? How about a closer working relationship? Seems there is lots of opportunity here for growth.

Movies

This is a tougher one – the company’s movie site gets 2.3% of its total traffic – it could be better perhaps with more custom content. To that end the company announced they joined forces with Playtone and Reliance Entertainment to bring Tom Hanks' multi-dimensional animated series "Electric City" to Yahoo! in 2012.

This could be a big break for the company and with YouTube launching original content channels by the dozen this move must be done to remain somewhat competitive.

Be cool

Apple, Google and Twitter are cool – Yahoo to me seems very corporate. The company has to loosen up its culture and its way of doing business. One of its biggest challenges is the hipsters and even younger generations aren’t using email which means Yahoo has to find new ways of remaining relevant with this crowd. If the image of the company isn’t right to begin with, any new services will have a lower take-up rate.

Expand

Google comes out with so many new services so quickly it makes the head spin. Yahoo is much slower in this area and needs to speed up. They need to take a group of top engineers and set them free to discover the next big thing(s).

Partner

I’ve mentioned a few partnership opportunities above but there needs to be many more. Partnering is an inexpensive way to grow your business while helping another company grow theirs.

Behavioral Targeting

Why isn’t Yahoo the best at returning ROI for advertisers? It should be as it has just so much information about its users. Years back I wrote about how Google’s purchase of DoubleClick would put the search leader in a better position in terms of analytics but I never imagined Yahoo wouldn’t be a powerhouse in this area. The company needs to improve and quickly.

Election

Yahoo needs election tie-ins and as many as possible to stay relevant. By this I mean it needs to be involved in building the community of questions and answers for many of the televised debates. YouTube is doing this as is parent company Google. Likewise for Twitter and others – Yahoo has to do better.

These are just some things Yahoo can do to improve its performance and perhaps more importantly relevance. In Internet time, Yahoo at over 15 is a dinosaur. The question is with Yang’s departure and a new CEO can the company reinvent itself as an embryo or will it be bogged down in-part due to a stodgy corporate culture which took years to build and may take even longer to dismantle.

Less Than 2% of Yahoo Users Want to Share on Facebook?

2011-12-24T14:45:41Z

Yahoo introduced news sharing on Facebook three months ago and will now roll out sharing to 26 other parts of its site including its omg entertainment news, television, movies and games. According to the AP few people are opting to share their Yahoo! activities on Facebook. In fact the article relays that Yahoo has said 12 million out of 700 million have chosen to do so. And as you may have guessed, many of these users who are sharing are 18-24.

Yahoo!'s challenge is not only to grow traffic and ad revenue but how to deal with a younger population which rarely uses e-mail but instead has decided social and SMS are the best ways for them to communicate.

It would seem this partnership with Facebook is the win/win the company needs as both parties are able to get what they need. For Facebook they get more traffic and engagement on their platform while for Yahoo, anything which increases traffic and keeps the company relevant is good for their shareholders. This partnership makes you wonder if Facebook will soon buy some pieces of Yahoo. I believe picking up the whole package would not be a smart move but some choice portals the company runs may make sense as an exploratory move to evolve Facebook into more than a social site.

Google Currents Crashes Newsreader Party

2011-12-09T17:38:52Z

Flipboard calls itself the pocket-sized social magazine and this is an apt description for a social newsreader so popular that this week when it launched an iPhone edition, it was overwhelmed with traffic and crashed. Obviously there is tremendous interest in this category which explains why in April of this year the company raised $50M at a $200M valuation.

Another player in the space Yahoo! has Livestand, an app which has improved over the months but still has a somewhat non-intuitive user interface. And there is Zite… Acquired by CNN this past August, this app is more like Flipboard with a solid UI and available on the iPhone this week as well.

As with any emerging space, Google often throws its hat in. And thus, this week Google Currents was launched and it is a solid entry into a crowded space. The UI is slick and intuitive and it works fast and has a clean layout.

There is no revenue model yet but one can easily imagine ads being overlaid on the pages or proudly displayed atop articles.

Will Google wipe out the others in this category? Maybe but for now it is its second shot at the space. Remember Fast Flip which came out in September of 2009 and euthanized two years later?

I happened to like Fast Flip but never really used it that often. I am generally a Google Reader user and the simple interface allows the rapid absorption of hundreds if not thousands of headlines during a busy day. But as I recall, it wasn’t easy to see lots of news at once with Fast Flip.

But with Currents you can see about five stories per page depending on the source, photos on the page, etc. You could call it a Flipboard rip-off.

The activity in this market shows us how important it is for the tech industry to have control over the reader interface. In other words, there is a race to see who can own the news reading space the way Kindle owns it for books.

The difference of course is quite often, news is free, meaning an ad model needs to be successfully applied to these readers and that works best when you have scale.

Google has the major advantage here as it has the advertisers and the deep analytic behavioral analysis to know what ads work best with what content. Moreover they know everything about you as you login with your Google credentials.

All this means that the other companies in this space will have a major challenge keeping up with Google when it comes to extracting the most revenue per viewer.

Interestingly Yahoo! should be a strong player in this space as they too have tremendous analytical information on users but its execution hasn’t been adequate for much of this decade.

The question you have to wonder is when will some of these companies partner with Facebook to show ads based on Facebook profile information? This should result in more targeted offers.

My bet is on Flipboard founder Mike McCue – I’ve known him for over a decade as he also founded Tellme and successfully sold it to Microsoft a few years back. One would imagine that Microsoft would pick up Flipboard as well in the next few months or years and then work with Facebook on integration of its advertising system with Bing data thrown in for good measure.

One other point worth making is Flipboard is a great way for users to manage their social networking experience, meaning Facebook has got to at some point be concerned about losing the control over the “social experience” its users have.

All the more reason this company too may be interested in picking up Flipboard at some point soon. This as you may recall was the reason in-part Twitter purchased Tweetdeck for $40M this past May.

I’ll keep you posted as this plays out but for now I’m going back to my tablet for some more flipping.

Carol Bartz Fired From Yahoo! What's Needed Now

2011-09-07T12:35:42Z

Without ever meeting Carol Bartz, I realized pretty quickly that her hiring was a CEO gamble as her experience was not in line with what was needed at a media company. I outlined my thinking in January of 2009. When you have one of the most-visited websites in the world, you don’t hire someone with no web experience to run it. Yet, that is what the Yahoo! board did. It is stupefying and part of the reason I said it was time for Bartz to go this past June.

But even worse than the hiring of Bartz was the firing – she was let go on the phone which is understandable as she was traveling and the company didn’t want to deal with leaks. But what is unfathomable is that there is no replacement.

I suppose this is understandable as well because news of the CEO search would leak back to Bartz and if she wasn’t let go first this could cause even larger problems. But then again if they promoted from within then this wouldn’t be as big of an issue. Isn’t it amazing that with such a massive staff, there doesn’t seem to be an insider who the board believes can permanently run things? Talk about a shallow bench.

Yahoo! stock performance under Bartz (click to enlarge)

When people complain about the large amount of CEO pay they should realize that the stock appreciation-based wealth creation for employees and shareholders is directly tied to effective CEO performance. And the beneficiaries are often pension funds and 401K holders. And as we can see from Yahoo!’s stock performance, there hasn’t been positive change while Carol Bartz was at the helm.

Moreover, Yahoo! has hopefully learned that it competes with Google and they need a leader who can go toe to toe with the search giant on apps, mobile and in the numerous areas such as video where Google has left the company in the dust.

Bartz was tasked with increasing the stock price of the company and she hasn’t been too successful in this regard. Moreover, strained relations with Alibaba which many blame on Bartz didn’t help boost her longevity.

So now that she is out, CFO Tim Morse is acting CEO and a management team of vice presidents and the executive counsel are helping to run things.

What the company needs more than anything is someone with amazing vision and execution ability – a person who can rebuild the corporate culture of the company and get the whole organization excited about the future and make them competitive. The problem is I don’t recall Yahoo! ever being competitive so this is a tall order. And that is the sad part – one of the best assets in the world might not ever see its revenue maximized.

Marketing Goes Almost Painfully Local

2011-08-02T20:04:59Z

Pay attention, you might just overhear something

One of the most memorable business stories I hav e heard was when a consultant friend of mine flew to a large customer to quote on a substantial project. He was traveling with his business partner and happened upon a shuttle bus to the rental car company with his competitor and a partner. None of these consultants had ever met but my friend and his partner had the luck to keep quiet as he overheard the other two people on the shuttle bus finalizing their pitch and setting the price for the project. My friend priced his proposal under the competition and got the project. Now, that’s the sort of thing you want to overhear.

I couldn’t stop thinking about this story as I saw news item after news item fall into place for this month’s column. You see, just like on the shuttle bus, if you pay attention, you can pick up valuable insight into the future of the marketing, sales, CRM and customer interactions.

The art of the deal sites

Perhaps no other recent trend has shaken up the tech markets like the rise of daily deal sites like Groupon, a company whose growth rate at 2,241% caused the Wall Street Journal to call it the fastest growing company in the history of humanity.

Deal sites are here to stay and everyone; I mean everyone is jumping on the bandwagon from Google to Glenn Beck.

What this tells us is you have to be an absolute savant to keep track of all the marketing opportunities out there and in order to maximize ROI you should be ahead of these trends or you may find yourself playing catch up with the competition. Ask yourself if your management is the kind to forward you an angry email from Groupon wondering why your biggest competitor used their service first. Depending on your answer, you should act accordingly.

Amazon and Google weren’t local enough?

The buzz in the local space is beyond deafening. Even if you cover your ears you feel like the news will find a way through your nostrils to directly inject itself into your grey matter. Just yesterday in fact Amazon quietly launched its own deal site allowing customers who are already used to getting deals from the largest e-tailer to get more local oriented deals – likely from the brick and mortar establishments once relegated to using newspapers and such for their mass marketing needs.

Let’s be honest – if you don’t have human-supercomputers working for you, how on earth will you keep track of all the social/local deal sites and opportunities out there? A logical answer is with some sort of aggregator. Well, guess what – Google just picked up Dealmap, a startup providing users with access to data from hundreds of group-buying sites. You get the feeling there is a strong trend here?

Foursquare isn’t playing around

You think the news flow has stopped? Then you should know that social check-in site Foursquare which some equate to GPS-enabled Twitter is retooling its service to give merchants access to promoting themselves to the millions of users it has. By sharing location-based information with merchants it aims to allow these customers to increase engagement with customers to hopefully persuade them to frequent their stores and part with some of their hard-earned cash. As you may have guesses, they expect to monetize their service with paying merchants.

Mobility is the future and your channel marketing choices infinite

If you follow the trend lines and the investments you see the world of commerce is expanding to handle smarter and ubiquitous cell phones and brick and mortar shops once excluded from the tech revolution are now able to cash in on the latest technologies and channels to get a piece of the dotcom 2.0 dream. As always, not every player will be a winner and moreover, some deal sites will be better suited to some product and geographic areas and to specific types of customers. The challenge becomes how to market to and engage with and manage so many new potential customers, channels and do it on a budget which makes your CXOs happy.

I leave you with one thought it’s that you should pay attention to your own management and the rapidly-growing space of new marketing channels. You should be experimenting, analyzing and paying attention because even if your company is comfortable doing things the old way, sooner or later your management is bound to receive a deal offer from another company in your space causing them to second guess your marketing initiatives. And from my perspective this is not the sort of news you ever want to overhear.

Keep Bing at Microsoft

2011-07-26T17:17:12Z

From a competitive position, it would be major trouble to remove Bing from the deep pockets of Microsoft. Talk of the business being potentially sold to Facebook when that company needs to focus on fighting Google+ makes little sense. There are few other strong software companies beyond Oracle and Salesforce who I think could do a better job with Bing than Microsoft.

But like I said in May, Microsoft is doing as much as can be expected with Bing.

We know Marc Benioff loves Google so count them out of such a purchase - and Oracle, no fan of Microsoft or Google probably doesn't need the headache or the money-losing business as it is doing fine right now, thank you.

Microsoft has to continue to make Bing better while simultaneously forging stronger relationships with companies who are competing with Google. Facebook and Twitter are two obvious ones - perhaps LinkedIn is another company to work very closely with.

You see as long as Google is a dominant player in so many spaces, Microsoft can play the underdog position and work with all the companies they want. And US and EU regulators won't be able to say much about these deals.

This is more or less what Oracle did - it rolled up the CRM and other corporate software markets under the cover of competing with the Microsoft monopoly.

Metaswitch Thrutu iPhone App Lets Carriers Become Social Hubs

2011-07-20T15:00:00Z

Earlier this year I came across Thrutu from Metaswitch newtorks - an application development platform allowing carriers to leverage rich social features and provide them as services to customers. In short, this is the exact sort of solution wireless phone companies need to try to keep their customers engaged and more importantly paying them.

Of even greater importance for service providers is being able to ensure that the contact database doesn't continue to get moved from the carrier cloud to the social cloud. By that I mean, consumers are relying more and more on Facebook and Twitter as their contact database making the carrier and the phones they sell less important.

Thrutu brings social features such as location, contact and photo sharing as well as prodding via a remote vibration (like Facebook's poke) and more via an API which developers can use to do much more.

I saw a demo of it working on Android phones and was impressed and as of this moment the company has released an iPhone version as well. As you may have guessed, you will be better off using such a service on a network voice and data can be shared such as GSM or in an area where there is WiFi and 3G/cellular.

Of course the question you have to ask is whether it is too late for carriers to basically reinvent social networks which are already dominated by the web giants we all know (and many love). A positive sign for carriers is that Thrutu has been downloaded more that 250,000 times in the first four months of its release. Not too shabby. One imagines iPhone users are good for at least 250k-500k more downloads making the universe larger and the network effect even greater.

Nosh from Google a P2P Foursquare Meets Zagats

2011-07-19T23:14:17Z

I just met with Craig Walker the Founder & CEO of Firespotter Labs and he went over where his Google-backed companies will be innovating in the future. As you may recall, Walker founded Dialpad and Grandcentral which eventually got acquired by and became the foundation of Google Voice. Walker explained his new company will be looking to disrupt markets where there is an opportunity to disrupt.

We can for example expect more disruption in telephony and the hospitality market was referenced by him as a space worth $600 billion/year and yet there has been little innovation beyond the buzzing pagers they give you when there is a line to get a seat.

His company's new app, Nosh available on iOS and Android aims to merge the best of Foursquare and Zagat with the p2p elements of having reviews done by users who could be your friends. You can rate food at the restaurant where you eat and you can share the rating with others - the scale is 1 to 5 stars. He did a demo of the app for me which you can see in the video below.

Eventually when enough data is collected they will allow search functionality showing you what others think of the grilled octopus or seafood bisque at your favorite restaurant.

To me this is a great idea because so much of this information is already being shared on Facebook and Twitter but it is uncategorized meaning if someone finds a roach in local diner and tweets about it - how on earth will a potential customer know about it?

At some point in the future, this app can add other categories allowing it to rate doctors, retail stores or anything else.

If it catches on it will force restaurants and other establishments to have even better levels of quality as potential customers will be able to instantly find negative reviews and consider them before purchasing.

Google+ Becoming Serious Facebook Threat

2011-07-06T20:24:15Z

Microsoft was known for producing winning products after its third attempt - we may be saying something similar about Google soon

Google, a company known as the king of search - certainly has a mixed record when it comes to other spaces. Obviously they are doing a great job in the mapping space and their Android OS has turned into a real winner. But when it comes to social they have had flop after flop.

But now, after a week, the company seems to be doing amazingly well - with some sites reporting large amounts of traffic coming from the new social network. That and there are many sites who have more followers in a week on Google+ than they amassed on Google Buzz which is years old.

The bottom line - Facebook may have a real challenger - and more importantly, it shows us that even when you believe a company has a space locked up in tech, it may not be the case. The irony of it all is that AOL in many ways invented the social network and they have abandoned the space virtually entirely to pursue a local media strategy which many think is ill-advised. Yahoo! had the guts of a social network but could never pull it together. And then there is Myspace.

And Google - kept plugging along - similar to how Microsoft became successful on its third try, we may soon be saying something similar about Google as well.

More on Search Engine Land.

Photobucket Outage

2011-04-13T12:06:10Z

Updated 4/14/2011, 4/15/2011 and 4/19/2011 - see below.

Originally posted 4/13/2011

Apparently my Photobucket account is one of the ones unavailable due to maintenance. I have come to rely on this cloud-based photo sharing service more and more as it works on iOS and the Sony Dash. There is an Android app as well which I have found doesn't display photos as well as it does on other operating systems. Here is the message the company gives when I try to login via the web.

Update 4/14/2011: Its been more than 24 hours and the site is still out. This is without a doubt one of the challenges of moving to the cloud - but that doesn't mean as a customer of a free service I feel I have such a strong right to complain.

Jim Goss, the company's VP of Operations expressed his apologies (see below) for the site being inaccessible via the Sony Dash, the web and iOS - I've tried all three. The amazing news is I am among the 0.25% of the user base affected - according to Goss. Ideally customers would receive an email when the service is working again. I am getting fed up with relogging in unsuccessfully on my Sony Dash which seems to function primarily as an expensive electronic photo frame.

Update 04/15/11: It's been 48 hours and yes, you guessed it - my photos and videos are nowhere to be found but this nice message below from Jim Goss is quite like the spoonful of sugar which makes the medicine go down. The good news is this latest post could be lasting - and would fit regardless of how long my photos remain in limbo - and hopefully they aren't lost.

Update 4/19/2011: It has now been six days and still no photos - this message is what I see when I try to upload photos.

The Photobucket blog is littered with maintenance update notices starting April 12, 2011 and a hardware issues update from April 18 which says there should be a solution today or tomorrow - we'll see.